This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream
media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously
biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in
each source note. Quotation marks are not used.
Source: BBC News
January 5, 2010
Archaeologists in Egypt have said they have discovered the largest known tomb in the ancient necropolis of Sakkara, to the south of Cairo.
The tomb dates back 2,500 years to the 26th Dynasty and contains important artefacts, including mummified eagles.
It is one of two newly discovered tombs found by an Egyptian team working close to the entrance of Sakkara, the burial ground for Egypt's ancient capital.
The tomb consists of a big hall hewn out of the limes
Source: BBC
January 4, 2010
TV footage showed the doll hanging by a noose in front of a red, white and blue sign that reads "Plains, Georgia. Home of Jimmy Carter, our 39th President".
Witnesses said the effigy had President Obama's name on it.
Plains Mayor LE Godwin III said the fire department had been called to take it down.
Source: NYT
January 1, 2010
Choi Sung-Yong remembers his father as a war hero who became a successful fishing boat captain, a reserved man who helped at orphanages and once splurged to buy his music-loving teenage son a record player, a true luxury at the time.
But all the memories are tinged with loss. In 1967, when Mr. Choi was just 15, his father’s boat failed to return from sea. The family went into mourning, assuming the boat had sunk. But three months later they were shocked to learn that Mr. Choi’s fath
Source: LA Times
December 18, 2009
It looks like Abraham Lincoln. It moves like Abraham Lincoln. And it quotes Abraham Lincoln. But historians say it still doesn't sound like Abraham Lincoln.
After a four-year absence, Walt Disney Co. pulls the curtain back today on a new high-tech version of Lincoln for its "Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln" show at the Opera House on Main Street in Disneyland...
While Although Disney imagineers spent the last year sweating such technological details as how to c
Source: Scarborough Evening News (UK)
December 31, 2009
Archaeologists have snapped the first picture of an ancient monument on the North York Moors near Scarborough which could date back more than 4,500 years to neolithic times.
Aerial surveyors from English Heritage recently flew two sorties over moorland near Goathland after a wildfire swept across 62 acres revealing the full extent of a prehistoric stone enclosure and multiple stone cairns.
The blaze struck in early October, but caused no lasting damage to the environment.
However, it
Source: Live Science
January 1, 2010
The dawn of 2010 promises more amazing developments in the world of technology. Already, tourists can visit space, for a price, nearly everything and everyone is going digital, and medical science continues to test the boundaries of what makes us truly human.
One full century ago, the new technologies that had people talking were considered just as groundbreaking. Electricity led the charge of developments that were changing the way people lived every day, with transportation and c
Source: Chicago Tribune
January 3, 2010
Archaeologists using ground-penetrating radar may have found the ruins of a grain mill owned by Revolutionary War figure George Rogers Clark on a bluff overlooking the Ohio River city named after him.
November's discovery left the team of researchers excited, said Cheryl Munson, an Indiana University archaeologist overseeing the high-tech imaging and excavations in a 280-acre historic district along Clarksville's riverfront.
She said the team picked up reflections fr
Source: BBC
January 3, 2010
Children of Blackshirt women, who joined Oswald Mosley's pro-Nazi British Union of Fascists, often feel that they have had to live with the burden of the guilt and shame caused by their mother's fascist sympathies.
Until then the most prominent political movement for women had been the Suffragettes.
Julie Gottlieb described the Blackshirt uniform as "a great marketing tool, and an incredible draw particularly for the youth. Some historians call this period the bat
Source: BBC
January 4, 2010
A US appeals court has upheld the conviction and sentence of 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui.
The only person charged in the US over the attacks, Moussaoui had originally pleaded guilty to conspiracy.
In 2005 he was sentenced to life in prison for his role in planning the attacks that killed nearly 3,000.
The appeals court in Virginia rejected his claim his conviction was invalid as the government had failed to provide evidence he could have used in d
Source: BBC
January 4, 2010
Archaeologists in Egypt have said they have discovered the largest known tomb in the ancient necropolis of Sakkara, to the south of Cairo.
The tomb dates back 2,500 years to the 26th Dynasty and contains important artefacts, including mummified eagles.
It is one of two newly discovered tombs found by an Egyptian team working close to the entrance of Sakkara, the burial ground for Egypt's ancient capital.
Source: CNN
January 4, 2010
Bobby DeLaughter -- the prosecutor who secured the conviction in the infamous Medgar Evers Mississippi murder case -- is himself now headed to prison.
It was DeLaughter's dogged 1994 prosecution and the subsequent conviction of Ku Klux Klan member Byron De La Beckwith that helped trigger the reopening of dozens of civil rights cold cases.
DeLaughter became an instant hero of the civil rights movement. Alec Baldwin portrayed him in the 1996 movie, "Ghosts of Missis
Source: AHA
January 4, 2010
In advance of the annual meeting, we are publishing the annual job report online a bit earlier than the rest of the January issue of Perspectives on History. It offers troubling news for job seekers, the history doctoral programs conferring their degrees, and the discipline as a whole.
In the 2008–09 academic year job advertisements fell by 23.8 percent—from a record high of 1,053 openings in 2007–08 to 806 openings in the past year. This was the smallest number of positions adverti
Source: Boston.com
January 2, 2010
Fifty years ago today, John F. Kennedy launched his campaign for the presidency of the United States, a run that only 10 months later resulted in his election.
Now, history buffs and Kennedy fans will be able to relive some of that historic campaign through a Twitter feed, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum says.
The feed, JFK__1960 (that's a double underscore, the library notes), will use campaign documents to follow the trail. Daily updates will tell
Source: The Seattle Times
January 2, 2010
That Chile is recognizing victims of its military dictatorship in a striking new "monument to memories" is positive, said Iglesias, both a victim and a historian of Augusto Pinochet's bloody 17-year rule. As a high-school student activist in Santiago in 1975, she was tortured before fleeing with her family to France.
The $19 million museum that opens in downtown Santiago on Jan. 11 is dedicated to the 31,000 murder, torture and kidnapping victims during the 1973-1990 milit
Source: CBS News
January 3, 2009
How Significant Will 2009 Appear in the Lens of History? Jeff Greenfield Focuses on How Another Iconic Year Played Out.
Now, consider the year 1959. Could that really be a year that changed everything?
The last year of the fifties, a decade whose image is all but etched in stone: men in grey flannel suits, Stepford wives in suburban complacency, a veritable white bread sandwich of a time?
Journalist Fred Kaplan thinks 1959 is exactly that kind of landmark
Source: BBC
January 2, 2010
Former Prime Minister Sir John Major has criticised Tony Blair's handling of the Iraq war and his presentation of the case for invasion in March 2003.
Sir John said he had reluctantly backed the war because he believed what Mr Blair had said as prime minister.
But now, he said, big questions had been raised by the evidence given to the Chilcott Inquiry into the war.
Sir John said it now seemed there were doubts before the invasion about whether there were
Source: AP
January 3, 2010
Serbian police have arrested a war crimes suspect wanted for the killing of at least 19 civilians in eastern Bosnia and other atrocities of the 1992-95 war.
The war crimes prosecutor's office says Darko Jankovic was apprehended Sunday.
Spokesman Bruno Vekaric says Jankovic is "potentially linked to horrendous crimes," including the killing of Muslim civilians near the Bosnian town of Zvornik in 1992. He gave no other details.
Source: AP
January 2, 2009
Jeanette Scola Trapani, one of the oldest survivors of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, has died at age 107.
Dolores Legge told the San Francisco Chronicle that her mother had been suffering from pneumonia and passed away at her home in El Dorado Hills on Monday.
Trapani had clear memories of the disaster, even though she was only four years old at the time, Legge said.
Source: AP
January 3, 2010
Freya von Moltke, a former Nazi resister who made her home in Vermont, died at the age of 98.
Her son, Helmuth von Moltke, told the Valley News that his German-born mother died Friday after suffering a viral infection earlier in the week.
Freya von Moltke and her husband were prominent members of the German resistance to the Nazis during World War II. Born into a banking family in 1911, Freya Deichmann met her future husband, Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, at age 18 and
Source: New York Post
January 3, 2010
Some 65 years ago, as World War II raged in Europe and the Pacific, the American people faced an unprecedented constitutional crisis of which they were completely unaware -- and which has remained a secret ever since.
It has long been known that President Franklin D. Roosevelt, during the last year of his life, was gravely ill with serious cardiac problems: He'd been diagnosed with acute heart failure in March 1944 and suffered from astronomically high blood pressure and arterioscle